The average road to extremes (Part 1)
The year 2025 has been quite a dramatic one, but then I'd said the same last year and the year before and so on. I'll reframe myself:
The year 2025 has been a dramatic one in the fashion of 2024. '23, '22 and all the years before.
How deep in time can we go this way? The 2008 collapse? The 2004 Tsunami? The Gulf War? 9/11? The fall of the Soviet Union? Moon landings? Mao's revolution? WWII? WWI? The October Revolution?
All of this is just the last century. Quite a wild, dramatic stack of dramatic years, eh? Think of each time someone exclaimed the same thing over a cup of tea or on a lazy bus ride after a hard day at work. Were they wrong? Wall Street says they were right!
Each time the world tilts away from the "perceived" normal, a finite game comes into play. Somebody wins, a lot of people lose. But almost always, the losers outnumber the winners. Why is it so?
Is it a fundamental flaw in the capitalist yarn of the society? Or is it perhaps related to some invisible hand pulling the strings? With a world as layered and dynamic as ours, anything and everything could pass off as plausible logic. The ground of reality is constantly churned by the rains of circumstance.
However, in the larger scheme of things, there indeed is a way to make sense of the "zeitgeist" by a strange pattern that pops up everywhere. And no, it's not randomness. Largely the opposite, in fact.
Things in nature tend to the normal.
This simply alludes to the Central limit theorem in Statistics and is widely true across fields and branches. Most of society is chaotic, in the sense that predicting social dynamics is nearly impossible owing to the uncountable degrees of freedom and individual moving parts. However, with every departure from the normal, society hinges itself on a sort of swing. The journey back to normal is what determines whether a society overshoots peace or undershoots war.
If all this sounds arcane, we are on the right path. It should be arcane until it isn't. This too, is part of the Swing.
I shall be diving deeper into this through longer essays. More on this when I'm less bored. Ciao.