Historic recurrence

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Mark Twain: "[A] favorite theory of mine [is] that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."

Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history.Template:EfnTemplate:Efn The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.

Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich HeineTemplate:Efn and Friedrich Nietzsche.Template:Efn

While it is often remarked that "history repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true.Template:Efn In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality.Template:Efn

An example is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman. Indeed, recurrences, in the form of reproducible findings obtained through experiment or observation, are essential to the natural and social sciences; and – in the form of observations rigorously studied via the comparative method and comparative research – are essential to the humanities.

André Gide offers a kindred thought: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

In his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, G. W. Trompf traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity. If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns. Historic recurrences of the "striking-similarity" type can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence", "resonance" or déjà vu.Template:Efn

Authors

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Polybius

Ancient western thinkers who thought about recurrence were largely concerned with cosmological rather than historic recurrence (see "eternal return", or "eternal recurrence"). Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historic recurrence include the Greek Hellenistic historian Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BCE), the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), Luke the Evangelist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Correa Moylan Walsh (1862–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).

An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historic recurrence is the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown. Confucius (ca. 551 – ca. 479 BCE) urged: "Study the past if you would define the future."

In the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote that asabiyyah (social cohesion or group unity) plays an important role in a kingdom's or dynasty's cycle of rise and fall.

G. W. Trompf describes various historic paradigms of historic recurrence, including paradigms that view types of large-scale historic phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant"; "reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived". He also notes "[t]he view proceeding from a belief in the uniformity of human nature [Trompf's emphasis]. It holds that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time." "Other minor cases of recurrence thinking", he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity, and the preoccupation with parallelism, that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena" (emphasis in original).

Lessons

G. W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for ... future action"—that "the same ... sorts of events which have happened before ... will recur". One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; c. 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world.

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Toynbee

The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Arnold J. Toynbee.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCETemplate:Sndafter 7 BCE), while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessorsTemplate:Efn—Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia—anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea that was to be developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Roman historian from a Celtic tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.

By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490s–510s: a Byzantine historian who lived in Constantinople) could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.

The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution, drawing an analogy between an individual human's life cycle and developments undergone by a body politic: this metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (c. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE – c. 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE). This social-organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle (384–322 BCE), would recur centuries later in the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the English philosopher and polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

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Freud

Can the mental ills of a social organism be treated, analogously to those of an individual? Sigmund Freud offered a tentative view, at the end of his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents:

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual ... may [it not be the case] that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of mankind — have become ‘neurotic’? ... [I]n spite of [the] difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes that "falsehoods and lying have become [widespread, but access to] factual truth ... can bring psychological relief".

Many depressive and anxious states prevalent in society respond to cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy that challenges cognitive distortions – maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes – and their attendant behaviors in order to improve emotional regulation and assist in the development of salutary coping skills. Mass media, to the extent that they offer true facts, can have a salubrious cognitive-behavioral effect on the social organism.

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Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli, analyzing the state of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:

when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (), idleness disorder, and disorder (ruin). In turn, from springs order, from order , and from this, glory and good fortune. Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his :

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples ... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.

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Ibn Khaldun

In 1377, the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddima (or Prolegomena), wrote that when nomadic tribes become united by asabiyya—Arabic for "group feeling", "social solidarity", or "clannism"—their superior cohesion and military prowess puts urban dwellers at their mercy. Inspired often by religion, they conquer the towns and create new regimes. But within a few generations, writes Ibn Khaldun, the victorious tribesmen lose their and become corrupted by luxury, extravagance, and leisure. The ruler, who can no longer rely on fierce warriors for his defense, will have to raise extortionate taxes to pay for other sorts of soldiers, and this in turn may lead to further problems that result in the eventual downfall of his dynasty or state.Template:Efn

Joshua S. Goldstein suggests that empires, analogously to an individual's midlife crisis, experience a political midlife crisis: after a period of expansion in which all earlier goals are realized, overconfidence sets in, and governments are then likely to attack or threaten their strongest rival; Goldstein cites four examples: the British Empire and the Crimean War; the German Empire and the First World War; the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the United States and the Vietnam War. Suggestions that the European Union is suffering a political midlife crisis have been put forward by Gideon Rachman (2010), Roland Benedikter (2014), and Natalie Nougayrède (2017).

David Hackett Fischer has identified four waves in European history, each of some 150–200 years' duration. Each wave begins with prosperity, leading to inflation, inequality, rebellion and war, and resolving in a long period of equilibrium. For example, 18th-century inflation led to the Napoleonic wars and later the Victorian equilibrium.

Sir Arthur Keith's theory of a species-wide amity-enmity complex suggests that human conscience evolved as a duality: people are driven to protect members of their in-group, and to hate and fight enemies who belong to an out-group. Thus an endless, useless cycle of ad hoc "isms" arises.

Similarities

One of the recurrence patterns identified by G. W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity".

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Johnson

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson wrote that people are "all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure". According to Freya Johnston,

"His attacks on [the pursuit of originality in the writing of literature] were born of the conviction that literature ought to deal in universal truths; that human nature was fundamentally the same in every time and every place; and that, accordingly (as he put it in the 'Life of Dryden'), 'whatever can happen to man has happened so often that little remains for fancy or invention.Template:'"

Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

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Putatively Plutarch

Poland's Adam Michnik believes that history is not just about the past because it is constantly recurring, and not as farce as Marx had it but as itself. Michnik writes: "The world is full of inquisitors and heretics, liars and those lied to, terrorists and the terrorized. There is still someone dying at Thermopylae, someone drinking a glass of hemlock, someone crossing the Rubicon, someone drawing up a proscription list." The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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Becket (center)

Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces the similarities between pairs of historical figures, one Greek and one Roman.

In 1079 Stanislaus of Szczepanów, Poland's Catholic primate, was murdered by his former friend, King Bolesław the Bold; and in 1170 England's Catholic primate Thomas Becket was murdered at the behest of his former friend, King Henry II.

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Cook

Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan's attempted conquest of Japan (1274, 1281) was frustrated by typhoons;Template:Efn and Spanish King Philip II's 1588 attempted conquest of England was frustrated by a hurricane.

Hernán Cortes's fateful 1519 entry into Mexico's Aztec Empire was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of him with their god Quetzalcoatl, who had been predicted to return that very year; and English Captain James Cook's fateful 1778 entry into Hawaii, during the annual Makahiki festival honoring Lono, the fertility and peace god, was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of Cook with Lono, who had left Hawaii, promising to return on a floating island, evoked by Cook's ship under full sail.

Poland's Queen Jadwiga, dying in 1399, bequeathed her personal jewelry for the restoration of Kraków University, which would occur in 1400; and Leland Stanford's widow Jane Stanford attempted, after his 1893 death, to sell her personal jewelry to restore Stanford University's financial viability, ultimately bequeathing the jewelry to fund the purchase of books for Stanford University.Template:Efn

On 27 April 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, in the Philippine Islands, foolhardily, with only four dozen men, confronted 1,500 natives who defied his attempt to Christianize them and was killed. On 14 February 1779, English explorer James Cook, on Hawaii Island, foolhardily, with only a few men, confronted the natives after some individuals took one of Cook's small boats, and Cook and four of his men were killed.

In 1812, French Emperor NapoleonTemplate:Sndborn a Corsican outsiderTemplate:Sndwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; and in 1941, German Führer Adolf HitlerTemplate:Sndborn an Austrian outsiderTemplate:Sndwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire's Soviet successor state, which was ruled by Joseph Stalin, born a Georgian outsider, thus precipitating the fall of the Third Reich.

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Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead; Martin Luther King Jr. worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead.

Countries, when politically stressed, have turned to religion for support and consolation. The Iranian revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran was led mainly by the religious leader Ruhollah Khomeini; and Pope John Paul II has been credited with helping end communist rule in his native Poland and the rest of Europe.

Over history, confrontations between peoples – typically, geographical neighbors – help consolidate the peoples into nations, at times into frank empires; until at last, exhausted by conflicts and drained of resources, the once militant polities settle into a relatively peaceful habitus.Template:Efn Martin Indyk observes: "Wars often don't end until both sides have exhausted themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them."

The importance of economic infrastructure to a country's – especially a great power's – capacity to wage war is reflected in Ferguson's law, which states that a great power that spends more on national-debt service than on defense risks losing its status as a great power. This law is supported by historical case studies and is relevant to the current situation of the United States, which in 2024, for the first time in nearly a century, began violating Ferguson’s law.

The rise of some great empires has been conditional on the dentition of a quadruped animal. Wendy Doniger explains:

"Unlike cows, horses, whose teeth are quite dull, pull up grass by the roots rather than biting off the blades, or they nibble it right down to the ground, thus quickly destroying the land, which may require some years to recover.... [H]orses in the wild... range constantly to find new territory... [T]he horse came to symbolize conquest through its own natural imperialism. The steppes bred nomadic horses and nomadic hordes.... Men waged war to get other people's horses so that they could wage war. Horsepower... remained the basic unit of power for centuries.... But the horse-breeding people of the steppes never succeeded in conquering the part of the world west of the Carpathians and the Alps, nor civilizations.... where sea power... was decisive."

Polities ignored Jan Bloch's 1898 warnings of the railroad-mobilized, industrialized, stalemated, attritional total war, World War I, that was on the way and would destroy an appreciable part of mankind; and polities ignore geologists', oceanographers', atmospheric scientists', biologists', and climatologists' warnings of tipping points in the climate system that are on course to destroy all of mankind. Joshua Busby, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that "climate change matters more than anything else."Template:Efn Christopher de Bellaigue writes:

"Like the Maya and the Akkadians we have learned that a broken environment aggravates political and economic dysfunction and that the inverse is also true. Like the Qing we rue the deterioration of our soils. But the lesson is never learned. [...] Denialism [...] is one of the most fundamental of human traits and helps explain our current inability to come up with a response commensurate with the perils we face."

There has been, and is, no paucity of threats to humankind's continued existence.

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Hobbes

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Newton

Humans tend to behave in accordance with the principles of social physics, some of which were described by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes after he met the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1636. When, half a century later, primacy in physics had migrated northward and Isaac Newton in 1687 published his Principia, further societal analogs to physical laws became discernible: to Newton's three laws of motion, including the third law, which states that "If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."

Humans, empirically-minded, tend to doubt what has not been presented by their own senses or by unquestioned authorities, and inertly to not act unless compelled by circumstances. John Vaillant, author of the book Fire Weather, writes – in reference to the global-warming crisis – of "the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally."

Naomi Oreskes cautions:

"In 2017 the [Svalbard Seed V]ault suffered a flood caused, ironically, by climate change. [p. 68.] [T]he seed vault assumes that we know enough to plan effectively and that people will pay attention to what we know. History shows this is often not the case. [T]he most important thing we can do right now is not to plan to respond to climate disaster after it happens but to do everything in our power to prevent it while we still have that chance. [p. 69.]"

Oreskes adds that "we do not have enough time for nuclear power to save us from the climate crisis"; and that "nuclear fusion is not the solution to the climate crisis".

Geoff Mann writes:

"[W]e are in desperate need of a politics that looks [the] catastrophic uncertainty [of global warming and climate change] square in the face. That would mean taking much bigger and more transformative steps: all but eliminating fossil fuels... and prioritizing democratic institutions over markets. The burden of this effort must fall almost entirely on the richest people and richest parts of the world, because it is they who continue to gamble with everyone else's fate."

Philosopher Jim Holt writes: "Whether you are searching for a cure for cancer, or pursuing a scholarly or artistic career, or engaged in establishing more just institutions, a threat to the future of humanity is also a threat to the significance of what you do."

While it was clear from the laws of physics that rising levels of "greenhouse gases" in Earth's atmosphere must eventually cause disastrous climate warming, with consequently enhanced droughts, floods, forest fires, and cyclones, people were easily lulled into complacency by the mendacities of fossil-fuel interests. Similarly, navies continue building aircraft carriers, at enormous expense, despite their clear vulnerability to attack, because their construction creates civilian jobs and because, says Stephen Wrage, political science teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy, "Historically, the top leadership of military organizations has not abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a calamity."

People ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear power plants, until anticipated nuclear power-plant accidents occur; and people ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons,Template:Efn which in 1945 destroyed two Japanese cities, have on several occasions come close to destroying more of the world's cities, and could still do so in future. The dangers of the fissile-fossil complex (nuclear-power generation; and fossil-fueled power generation) have been denied or minimized by power interests, as the dangers of tobacco smoking have been denied or minimized by tobacco interests.

Jessica Tuchman Mathews, daughter of The Guns of August author Barbara Tuchman, observes that "powerful reasons to doubt that there could be a limited nuclear war [include] those that emerge from any study of history, a knowledge of how humans act under pressure, or experience of government." Apposite evidence for this is provided in Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon, which makes clear, on the basis of recently declassified documents, that it was a matter of sheer chance that war was averted during the Cuban Missile Crisis: numerous events, had they taken a slightly different course, could each have precipitated nuclear war.Template:Efn

Nuclear war being viewed as impractical, superpowers have instead waged proxy wars in non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.

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Madison

Fintan O'Toole discusses, using historic examples, how external threats to a country – or even mere allegations of such threats – can serve politicians' efforts to suppress internal liberties and dissent:

[I]mperial fantasies create the conditions for an imperial presidency... that leverages supposed foreign dangers to justify domestic tyranny. In 1793 James Madison warned that "war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." International adventures, he wrote, inflate the persona of the president [of the United States] and unleash the "strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast: ambition, avarice, vanity." Five years later Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

In a similar vein, Laleh Khalili writes:

The United States... has waged a war of some sort in every year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for business. And many of its most powerful people want us to stop worrying about frivolities like ethics or ecology and love the bomb.... For the armchair techno-warriors of Silicon Valley, the barbarians at the gate are a useful solution.

Appositely, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes:

"Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity—the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat—fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests at stake. Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity."

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Gellhorn

O'Toole writes about American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998):

Her dispatches were not first drafts of history; they were letters from eternity. ... To see history – at least the history of war – in terms of people is to see it not as a linear process but as a series of terrible repetitions ... It is her ability to capture ... the terrible futility of this sameness that makes Gellhorn's reportage so genuinely timeless. [W]e are ... drawn... into the undertow of her distraught awareness that this moment, in its essence, has happened before and will happen again.

Casey Cep, describing a dissonance between William Faulkner's documented personal racism and Faulkner's depiction of the American Confederacy, writes that Michael Gorra, in The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020),

posits that [the character] Quentin [Compson, who suicides in Absalom, Absalom!] represents Faulkner's view of tragedy as recurrence. "Again" was the saddest word for the character and the author alike because it "suggests that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever." ... "What was is never over", Gorra writes, pointing out that the racism that ensnared Faulkner in the last century persists in th[e 21st] ... "Again. That's precisely why Faulkner remains so valuable – that very recurrence makes him necessary."

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Amis

British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline are mirrored in the novels published; according to Amis, novels follow current political trends. In the Victorian era, when Britain was the ascendant power, British novels were large and tried to express what society as a whole was. British power waned during the Second World War and ended after the war. The British novel was then some 225 pages long and centered on narrower subjects such as career setbacks or marriage setbacks: the British novel's "great tradition" increasingly looked depleted. Ascendance, according to Amis, had passed to the United States, and Americans such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike began writing huge novels.

O'Toole writes, of the prevailing demise of absolute monarchy, especially in capitalist polities:

There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. ... [C]apitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. ... [S]cience, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth – and ... giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it [i.e., power]."

Novelists and historians have discerned recurrent patterns in the histories of modern political tyrants.

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García Márquez

Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), writes Ariel Dorfman, documents the "viral recurrence" around the world, over the past century, of despots and authoritarians "with comparable strategies of control and mendacity". Ben-Ghiat divides the narrative into three – at times, overlapping – periods:

Dorfman notes the absence, from Ben-Ghiat's study, of many authoritarian rulers, including communists like Mao, Stalin, Ceaușescu, and the three Kims of North Korea. Nor is there mention of Indonesia's Suharto or the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, "though the CIA engineered coups that led to both ... lording it over their lands, and the agency can also be linked to Pinochet's military putsch in Chile." Dorfman believes that Juan Domingo Perón would also have been an instructive example to include in Ruth Ben-Ghiat's study of Strongmen.

Evan Osnos observes: "Oligarchs-in-chief don't like to retire, because civilian life leaves them vulnerable to retribution from those they ejected from their club."

British political commentator Ferdinand Mount brings attention to the ubiquitous recurrence of mendacity in politics: politicians lie to cover up their mistakes, to gain advantage over their opponents, or to achieve purposes that might be unpalatable or harmful to their public or to a foreign public. Some notable practitioners of political mendacity discussed by Mount include Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Clive, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump.

Jonathan Freedland identifies another tactic in addition to mendacity – humor – in the armamentarium of 21st-century politicians:

"Perhaps what galled [Rory] Stewart and his Tory allies most, just as it infuriated their Never Trump counterparts in the Republican Party, was the flight from truth. The embodiment of the malaise was Boris Johnson... [Stewart] might also have mentioned humor, which was a secret weapon for Johnson just as it remains for Trump. US readers are likely to think of Trump when Stewart reflects that Johnson was dangerous precisely because 'he alone could cloak a darker narrative in clowning.' Both men allowed and, in Trump's case, still allow 'the public to indulge ever more offensive opinions under the excuse that some of it might be a joke.'... The grief that runs through [Stewart's] book is not for his party only. It is for his country.... Britain's international influence is now at the margins, especially after the country's exit from the EU.... [Stewart] has contempt for the media's fixation on the trivial and the personal... Stewart discovered that, in contemporary politics, the liar who is brazen about his lies is seen as refreshingly honest, while the honest candidate who errs, but fails to brag about it, is the liar.... The reluctant, introspective, intellectual pol[itician] can flourish for a while; they can even capture the imagination, especially of those voters who pride themselves on not falling for anything so shallow as charisma. But they rarely win."

The very languages in which humans communicate show some striking similarities. Allison Parshall offers an example:

"Many languages have an interjection word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski et al., writing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, have] found that pain interjections tend to contain the vowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the International Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the 'bouba-kiki' effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a feeling about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate the trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)

See also

• The Anatomy of Revolution
• Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 BCE) noted that bad coin drives good coin out of circulation (as per the later Gresham's law), even as ruthless politicians drive "upright, blameless" men out of a polity's governance.
• Authoritarianism
• Benford's law
• Big Bounce (pulsating-universe theory)
• Cliodynamics
• Cognitive inertia
• Collapsology
• Dynastic cycle
• Ecocide
• Eternal return (or "eternal recurrence")
• Eureka: A Prose Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1848 (Big Bang theory)
• Exceptionalism
• Failed states
• Ferguson's lawTemplate:Efn
• Fractal
• Gerontocracy
• Hegemony
• History of scholarship
• Intermarium, Three Seas Initiative
• Iron law of oligarchy
• Is the Holocaust Unique?
• Kakistocracy
• Kleptocracy
• Language death
• Linguicism
• List of empires
• List of former monarchies
• List of genocides
• List of great extinctions
• List of military nuclear accidents
• List of modern great powers
• List of multiple discoveries
• List of nuclear power accidents by country
• List of nuclear powers
• List of proxy wars
• List of totalitarian regimes
• Logology
• Miscarriages of justice
• The New Science
• Nuclear close calls
• Oligarchy
• "On Discoveries and Inventions"
• Peace and conflict studies
• Plutocracy
• Repetition, a related concept by Søren Kierkegaard
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
• SNAFU
• Social cycle theory
• Social organism
• Social physics
• Societal collapse
• Socioeconomic inequality
• Surviving Progress
• Thucydides Trap
• Tipping point (sociology)
• Yuasa Phenomenon – migration of center of activity of world science
• Zipf's law

Bibliography

• Graham Allison, "The Myth of the Liberal Order: From Historical Accident to Conventional Wisdom", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4, 2018, pp. 124–133.
• Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, 2nd ed., New York, The Guilford Press, 2011.
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• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, new ed., W.W. Norton, 2005.
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• Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27.
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• Niall Ferguson, "Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power" (working paper), Hoover Institution, Hoover History Lab, Applied History Working Group, 21 February 2025.
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• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated from the German by James Strachey, 1930.
• David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
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• Elizabeth Kolbert, "This Close; The day the Cuban missile crisis almost went nuclear" (a review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, Knopf, 2020), The New Yorker, 12 October 2020, pp. 70–73.
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Further reading

• Ed Helms, SNAFU: the Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2025. "Spanning from the 1950’s to the 2000’s ... SNAFU ... offers ... insights that ... might [help] prevent history from repeating itself again and again."
• The Editors, Scientific American, "There Are No Climate Havens: Special regions or areas people can move to that are untouched by climate change do not exist", vol. 332, no. 5 (May 2025), pp. 76–77.
• Elizabeth Kolbert, "Rat Pack: The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future", The New Yorker, 7 October 2024, pp. 60–63.
• Bolesław Prus, "Mold of the Earth", an 1884 microstory about the history of the world, reflecting the ebb and flow of human communities and empires.
• M. V. Ramana, Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, Verso, 2024.

External links

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